After trying to beat back the Mac's increasing encroachment into the PC world with ads focused on price, Microsoft's club has been picked up by Apple to give Windows 7 an embarrassing pummeling in terms of price.

Explaining that the company wanted as many Mac OS X Leopard users as possible to upgrade to the new Snow Leopard, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller announced a $29 upgrade price for Snow Leopard and a $49 family pack upgrade. Users who buy a new Mac between the June 8 announcement and the release of Snow Leopard can get a copy of the new software for even cheaper, just $9.95 to cover shipping and handling.

Apple hasn't explicitly stated it yet, but it appears that the retail box of Snow Leopard could still be priced at $129, although it's hard to imagine who would need to buy the new operating system at retail rather than as an upgrade, particularly since it requires a relatively modern Mac to run, mostly machines that either shipped with Leopard or have already upgraded to use it.

While Apple is slashing the cost of Snow Leopard dramatically even as demand and interest in the Mac platform is on an upswing, Microsoft did just the opposite with the release of Windows Vista, bumping up the cost of upgrades and retail copies and introducing new pricing tiers to artificially restrict features to pricier editions even as expansion of the PC market began to plateau and as the emergence of cheap new netbooks began to question the need for an expensive operating system.

Microsoft has since backtracked on Vista's pricing, and for the first time ever, the company has essentially given away a year's worth of Windows licensing by pumping out free copies of its Windows 7 "release candidate" software on the market to stem the tide of Windows defectors and entice disgruntled Vista users back with a real life, wide scale Mojave Experiment. Of course, it's only free until next summer, at which point users' Windows 7 PCs will stop working until payments are made. In any other industry, this strategy might be characterized as product dumping, but in the PC industry that Microsoft has ruled as a de-facto corporate government for the last twenty years, it's just business as usual.

Leopard vs Vista

Apple's decision to offer Snow Leopard to Mac users on the cheap contrasts with Microsoft's first-one-is-free tactic for Windows in that Apple is essentially rewarding its loyal customers, while Microsoft is working to win back the interest of jilted PC users after several bouts of abuse: security nightmares, price tag beatings, broken promises on features, and poor performance.

Unlike the very popular Leopard, many Windows PC users who ended up with Vista demanded to get a Windows XP downgrade. PC makers felt such a backlash in customer demand that they pressured Microsoft to at least bundle a Windows XP installer disc with new systems, allowing them to continue to sell PCs while Microsoft could continue to at least count the sales' bundled Vista licenses to claim some success for the company's most underwhelming Windows release in recent memory.

Vista was soundly rejected even by corporate users, who have historically acted as a strong barrier to any new competition against Windows in the PC operating system market by resisting alternative software in lockstep. Microsoft's monopoly essentially attacked itself as if an autoimmune disorder; the company has worked so hard to prevent new competitors from entering the market that it now can't offer anything really new itself either.

Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, was quick to grab at that loose string on Microsoft's sweater and tugged hard to unravel it at WWDC, noting that while Vista attempted to compare itself with Mac OS X, it carried forward the same old technologies that had hurt the Windows experience since the 90s, specifically noting problem-plagued DLLs, the configuration mess of the Windows registry, the archaic notion of expecting users to defragment their disks manually, and the annoyance of Vista's UAC popups.

"What a big hole Microsoft has dug," Serlet said. "They're trying to get out of it with Windows 7; it's the same old technology as Vista. Fundamentally, it's just another version of Vista."

From the beginning, Apple has characterized Snow Leopard as a refinement release, initially suggesting it would have no new features apart from support for Microsoft Exchange. While there are a lot of refinements and some new features, the company has stuck to making Snow Leopard primarily a unifying reference release rather than a splashy collection of new consumer features as Leopard was. "We love Leopard, so we decided to build upon Leopard," Serlet said. "We want to build a better Leopard."

Snow Leopard vs Seven

Some pundits were confused by Serlet's comments, thinking that there was some hypocrisy in his nailing Windows 7 for being another Vista when Snow Leopard is itself clearly another Leopard. But the point Serlet made wasn't that Microsoft was failing to make great enough leaps in its marketing. It's that Microsoft was really only focusing on making great leaps with its marketing. While Snow Leopard jettisons a variety of legacy technologies and ushers in significant new ones, including Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, and QuickTime X, it still increments itself following the usual sequence of new Mac OS X reference releases to 10.6.

The name Windows 7 suggests a major new release, when in reality the company's new operating system is internally numbered as Windows 6.1. Microsoft's executives have never denied that Windows 7 was actually a tuneup of Vista. In the words of Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, "it's Windows Vista, a lot better."

Microsoft is notorious for picking its software version numbers out of marketing meetings rather than scheduling releases around engineering efforts as Apple has. Mac OS X has been progressively and predictably notching up a single increment with every reference release over the past decade, and the internal numbering system for its Darwin core OS numbers back to NeXTSTEP releases of the late 80s (Snow Leopard's Darwin OS release will be 10.0). Mac OS X itself gets its "ten" from the releases of the classic Mac OS. No number games there.

In contrast, the Windows NT code base that both Vista and Windows 7 are based on started its numbering with version 3.1. Exchange Server similarly started out without a 1.0 or 2.0 release for marketing reasons. And really, who would have gotten excited about Windows 2000 and Windows XP if they'd been pushed to market as simply Windows 5.0 and 5.1? Vista and "Windows 7" similarly have far more flamboyant panache than Windows 6.0 and 6.1.

Too Rich

There's no rules that define how developers must number their software, and Microsoft can use all the distraction it wants in creating number games that seek to distance Windows 7 from the disaster that was Vista. Apple certainly employs as much hyperbolic marketing as it can to sell its engineering work to consumers. However, what consumers will see when they unbox a new Windows PC will be a tamed down version of Vista with fewer problems, with a more Mac-like user interface. In contrast, what Mac users will experience with Snow Leopard is a noticeably faster, animately richer, 6GB thinner, and much cheaper operating system experience.

Steve Jobs didn't even need to show up at WWDC to disprove the notion that you can never be too rich or too thin. Now his company is set to show that it's not afraid to be cheap, either. And while Microsoft can continue to harp on the idea that there are lower-end PCs from Dell and HP that forgo sexiness and performance and usability to deliver cheap hardware, it won't be able to say the same thing about the product it actually sells, because a full Windows 7 copy has to be priced at around $300 retail to prop up Microsoft's software-only Windows business, something that's already in flames with the collapse of global PC growth and the tumorous expansion of cheap netbooks that don't reap Microsoft any software revenues.

With Snow Leopard costing a fraction of the cost of Windows 7, it will make Microsoft's cheapskate ads ring hollow and force the company to face dramatically competitive software pricing pressures that the PC industry has never demanded of Microsoft before. In twenty years, the price of Windows has only ratcheted upwards as PC prices have dropped. Apple is now cutting off the PC operating system's oxygen supply just as it helped dry up any demand for Windows Mobile licensing with the iPhone.

Even if Windows 7 gains traction in ways Vista never did, the downward pricing pressure Apple is exerting will prevent Microsoft from inhaling the inflated revenues the company has grown addicted to, which will benefit both Mac users and PC users. Additionally, it promises to potentially open up more opportunities for alternative operating systems such as Linux by cutting the dominating control Microsoft exercises over PC hardware vendors.

For the record, this post reads like a very dry parody of a rabid fanboy. I would be impressed if that was the intention, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, so bravo!

lol, i assume it was intentional....literary dramatics aside, the article is good and points out the most basic of points: If Win7 and OSX SL are both "upgrades" and not full-fledged new OSes, then Apple has MSFT in one hell of a corner by only charging $29.

I was about to say the same thing. Apple advocacy is one thing, this article is just over the top.

lol. I enjoy reading the over the top articles, but only because I'm rational enough to see through it. Apple haters will take the same article and tear it apart, not having been able to see the actual points illustrated in the piece.

Downward pricing pressure? What downward pricing pressure? Windows is effectively free for most folks because they buy a whole new box every few years.

Very few folks pay $300 for Vista.

Yea, they just steal it.

There's a marketing technique that works really well. If you have nothing to sell, sell the fear and humility. So MS is selling the fear that you will go broke or be embarrassed by your Apple purchase. That you spent too much and could have spent less and got the same experience.

It's worked so far hasn't it. Apple is simply squashing those techniques and giving away (so to speak) leopard 2 is going to open them up to a whoop-azz commercial set to inform the public... "Hey we like our customers and we gave them the OS for nothing to pennies but MS keeps asking you to pay and pay? What kind of friend does that...." Type. The "too bad your not an Apple customer, we take care of you... Upgrade prices, Genius's, One-One training, online training...

The essential points made by Prince ring true: Win 7 is one part marketing puff, and the upgrade pricing scheme is a blatant attempt at market manipulation.

But nonetheless the PC users of the world will very likely embrace Win 7 as the "good version of Vista." aging XP's general obsolescence is becoming apparent and all those older PC's are near the end of their life cycle anyway. so rather than upgrade, XP PC users will finally buy new computers - as soon as their budgets allow - and be quite happy with the UI improvements of Win 7, which MS advocates will claim make it just as user friendly as Mac OS. Whereas Vista was more or less a flop, Win 7 will be deemed a success.

Apple's Snow Leopard needs to offer some real substantive advantage over Win 7 for Apple to continue to grow its market share gradually as it has. scorn for MS' BS isn't going to work.

The one real difference between the two may be their real world speed for everyday use. people really do notice the speed of things they do all the time. Apple made a big deal about SL's speed at WWDC yesterday. and all the test reports note Vista/Win 7 are notably slow/inferior with multitasking, which is a very meaningful issue.

With the release dates for both new OS just a month apart, Apple has set up a head-to-head SL vs. Win 7 showdown - which is certainly how the media will play the story. Apple must think this is to its advantage.

if that showdown features speed test vs. speed test with Snow Leopard a clear winner - something even the simpleminded media can understand, like a car race - that would be a big win for Apple and support its continued market growth. we'll see ...

I don't generally disagree with AppleInsider's anti-PC or pro-Mac positions, nor can I say that I think it's inappropriate given the context of the website, but the propagandized tone of some of their articles can be laughable if not even absurd at times.

I don't generally disagree with AppleInsider's anti-PC or pro-Mac positions, nor can I say that I think it's inappropriate given the context of the website, but the propagandized tone of some of their articles can be laughable if not even absurd at times.

well try reading this article; which isn't propaGanda from AI -its from a different source with the TRUTH & CONSEQUENCEs of Windoze BLOATWARE and why MICRO$HIT has so many problems..

then repost here...

there was a song way back when and it went something like ...
WAKE UP EVERYBODY NO MORE SLEEPING IN BED...

The Truth and the Consequences

Micro$hit cannot prevent interlopers from corrupting the system and the computer hardware resources. Micro$hit can tell you after the fact you need to restore your system because it's been compromised but they can't stop it from happening in the first place. No other operating system does this. It's not a real operating system if you can't protect resources including the system code itself and Windows can't do that. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

Ordinary program files can't be protected. Rootkits are installed with the greatest of ease - and without relying on social engineering to escalate privileges. Malware abounds - over 100,000 strains in the wild. And so forth. This is the price to pay for putting a standalone single user system on the Internet without a thought to the safety of one's paying customers.

Why won't Micro$hit improve things? Because they can't. Because they have so many millions of third party software titles they depend on. These titles would break under a new system. Operating system vendors need a thriving third party software market to survive - but it works the other way around too: if the third party software sector grows too big it can prevent the operating system vendor from making changes that need to be made.

Micro$hit could ship Windows sandboxed in Linux; but then every Windows user would have access to Linux and third party software would just ignore Windows in the future. Micro$hit would lose their stranglehold on the personal computing market.

In a world of pervasive networking even an operating system designed for single user use needs multiuser capability because without that any network transaction that can trick a user into running malicious code that will subvert the entire system. Without strong multitasking the ability of an operating system to handle network traffic and run user programs at the same time will be impaired.

As the designers of BeOS noticed, the requirements of pervasive networking cannot be met without implementing something very close to general purpose timesharing. Single user client operating systems cannot thrive in an Internetted world.

Windows gets away with having severe deficiencies in these areas only by virtue of having developed a monopoly position before networking became really important and by having a user population that has been conditioned to accept a shocking frequency of crashes and security breaches as normal.

This is not a stable situation. (and this DOESn't EXIST ON APPLE's MAC OS X LEOPARD)
- Eric Raymond

... Apple's Snow Leopard needs to offer some real substantive advantage over Win 7 for Apple to continue to grow its market share gradually as it has. ... The one real difference between the two may be their real world speed for everyday use. people really do notice the speed of things they do all the time. Apple made a big deal about SL's speed at WWDC yesterday. and all the test reports note Vista/Win 7 are notably slow/inferior with multitasking, which is a very meaningful issue.

With the release dates for both new OS just a month apart, Apple has set up a head-to-head SL vs. Win 7 showdown - which is certainly how the media will play the story. Apple must think this is to its advantage.

if that showdown features speed test vs. speed test with Snow Leopard a clear winner - something even the simpleminded media can understand, like a car race - that would be a big win for Apple and support its continued market growth. we'll see ...

I can appreciate the hand wringing, but it certainly *is* to Apple's advantage to compare Snow Leopard and Windows 7 "head to head."

This is exactly what they want and the comparison won't look good for Windows 7. The only current "big item" that Windows 7 does better than Snow Leopard is a few security features (which curiously didn't come up at the keynote). Unless Apple has made zero progress between leopard and Snow Leopard on things like address randomisation, Snow Leopard should blow Windows 7 out of the water on *any* feature and now on price as well.

In Windows, a window can be a document, it can be an application, or it can be a window that contains other documents or applications. Theres just no consistency. Its just a big grab bag of monkey...

Edit:
My wife, pc user since mid 1980's, switched to Apple (MBP 15) in January 2009 because she would not work with Vista. (Hat tip to Apple One-on-One crew in Austin for making my life great as she learned to think different!) This morning, traveling in NY, watched her work with a laptop running Vista during her presentation and express utter disgust over the experience. Thanks MS for sending my wife so far over the edge she choose Apple. w00t!!

First: how you know that Snow Leopard will be cheaper than Windows 7? When you buy a new PC you will get a FREE upgrade to 7 soon. And even owners of old PCs can buy 7 and improve their system without buying new hardware. Snow Leopard only runs on the newest hardware (as you mentioned).

What's bad of delivering a free preview version of Windows 7 to customers? I smell envy here.

"Many" users got to downgrade to XP? Many? Where? This was only a very special deal for enterprise customers from some suppliers. And mostly only for netbooks. Show me a < $ 300 netbook that runs Leopard officially, please!

Apple is rewarding its loyal customers? What? Charging for every single major update even for features that should have been there since 10.0 like the innovative (!) Put Back button in the trash?

Why is it so difficult for the author to find proper arguments? There are a lot if you just try to think yourselve instead of repeating what Apple says on a marketing event.

Here are some more questions to ask: when will the Mac see great speech recognition, powerful handwriting recognition (not only for single Chinese characters), Blu-Ray support, full out-of-the-box TV viewing and recording or a resolution indepentend UI like Vista delivers for 2 years now?

Basically Netbooks are low low bargin-bin price, and with it the market agenda that "You're not running a computer, you're running a web browser terminal".

In came an influx of free linux-esque OSs, because, compatibility is suddenly not important. You don't want it to run MS office, exchange, games, or any other of MS's fortes. Thus it was marketed as "Windows free" and consumers lured by the price and size, accepted it.

And with that acceptance, grew MS alternatives. Gmail, web based desktop publishing, etc (Essensically, baiting people to stop using MS office and other windows monopoly stuff)

And this lead to a terrible situation for MS. People wanted Windows free machines, because it was percieved as cheaper and willing to use alternatives.

(just like iphone killing windows mobile licenses)

This lead to MS cutting license prices (usually XP) to get them on netbooks, essentially destroying their business models. (MS getting rapped at the own game, funny).

This isn't usually a problem, software is essentially free if no one buys it. But it is, if competitors also cut off future products like Vista (which won't go on netbooks, because it needs to make money).

And if Apple decides to go playing a price war with windows 7. MS is basically in a situation of fighting it's own tactics, your revenue stream is being cut from behind, and your business model above has suddenly run into roadblocks.

It's like loosing your job and paying the mortgage. Even if you got lots of cash in the bank, things can eventually dry up, unless you get out of the situation.